KSJ Tracker
October 15, 2013

Slur sparks turmoil among science bloggers and at Scientific American.

Early last Wednesday morning, Danielle N. Lee, who describes herself as a "hip hop maven" who "blogs on urban ecology, evolutionary biology & diversity in the sciences" at Scientific American and elsewhere, received an email invitation to contribute to Biology-Online.org from somebody named Ofek, who said he was the blog editor there.

Lee then gathered her thoughts and responded on Friday as many of us might--by preparing a post on this exchange for her blog--The Urban Scientist at Scientific American. She was angry, but she also managed to be both funny and insightful, not something many of us can pull off when we're enraged. She writes that what she wanted to say was, "Ofek, don’t let me catch you on these streets, homie!" But in her "official" response--an embedded video clip-- she settled for something a bit more reflective than that. "I was really taken aback that you responded so rudely," she says, before looking into the camera and saying "Let me make this clear..." Scholars and scientists, she said, should contribute to such things on their own terms. They shouldn't be bullied into working for nothing.

That's a highly reasonable and appropriate response to Ofek's almost unbelievable snarl. The post and a flurry of congratulatory tweets could have been the end of this story.

But then Scientific American took the post down. And SciAm's editor in chief, Mariette diChristina, tweeted this:

In a substantial post at Wired, Maryn McKenna, who is also a columnist and contributing editor at Scientific American, wrote this about the tweet:

So let’s just unpack what happened. According to Dr. Lee, the only notice she received that her post was considered inappropriate was its vanishing from the blog site. SciAm did not communicate with her about it other than by the tweet above. And SciAm said nothing about the uncalled-for abuse of one of their bloggers by one of their partnership representatives.

The tweet unleashed a huge outpouring of criticism on Twitter, with many of the tweets carrying the hashtag #standingwithDNLee or #BoycottSciAm. No longer limited to one horrible slur and a rational response, the exchange had immediately become a serious controversy concerning the behavior of a Scientific American, an iconic institution.

By Sunday, DiChristina was back with a blog post saying SciAm was "committed to working to try to put this right as best we can." Acknowledging the "real and important issues regarding the treatment of women in science and women of color in science," she wrote that SciAm "could not quickly verify the facts of the blog post and consequently for legal reasons we had to remove the post." She didn't say what the legal issues were, and it's difficult to imagine legal circumstances so dire that the post had to be removed immediately. She said she regretted "that we were not able to communicate our decision to Dr. Lee before removing the post."

She continued: "We intend to discuss how we can better investigate and publicize such problems in general and search for solutions with Dr. Lee and with the wider scientific community."

If you go there now, you will see no mention of Biology-Online. You will also find a new note that says, "This 'partnership network' is no longer active." But on Oct. 13, according to the internet archive Wayback Machine, Biology-Online was there, and the note was not. DiChristina wrote in her blog post that "Biology-Online is neither a part of Scientific American, nor a 'content partner.'" But it had been listed as such.

In the meantime, several other science bloggers republished Lee's post in its entirety. The fury continued to grow until yesterday afternoon, when Scientific American republished Lee's original post, with an editor's note. Biology-Online also issued an apology yesterday. Alan Weisleder, a partner in the company that owns Biology-Online, sent Lee an email saying he was "totally shocked," and that Ofek, the online editor who started all of this, had been fired.

I suspect that most of the people involved in this mess had good intentions. DiChristina is the first female editor of Scientific American, and she had to fight to get where she is. This is a person who is likely to understand the difficulties women face in science. Bora Zivkovic, Scientific American's blog editor, tweeted the following:

But the way it unfolded was deeply unfortunate, and the wounds will take some time to heal. As McKenna points out in a follow-up post today, Scientific American should be prepared to respond much more quickly; the Internet doesn't take weekends off.

Mistakes happen, but often, as in this case, failure to quickly rectify those mistakes makes the problem much, much worse. If Scientific American had sought legal advice before taking down Lee's post, if it had explained its actions more quickly and more thoroughly, and if it had been clearer about its "partner" relationship with Biology-Online, this would not have grown to such colossal size. And it would not have so offended so many of Scientific American's friends and allies.

The lesson here is not that we should never make mistakes. That might be nice, but it's not going to happen. The lesson is that when we make mistakes, we should correct them as thoroughly and as quickly as possible.